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Social media platforms attempting to curb abuse and misinformation have been accused of political bias. We deploy neutral social bots who start following different news sources on Twitter, and track them to probe distinct biases emerging…
Malicious Twitter bots are detrimental to public discourse on social media. Past studies have looked at spammers, fake followers, and astroturfing bots, but retweet bots, which artificially inflate content, are not well understood. In this…
Online social networks usage has increased significantly in the last decade and continues to grow in popularity. Multiple social platforms use volunteers as a central component. The behavior of volunteers in volunteer-based networks has…
In recent years, Twitter has seen a proliferation of automated accounts or bots that send spam, offer clickbait, compromise security using malware, and attempt to skew public opinion. Previous research estimates that around 9% to 17% of…
Social media platforms like X(Twitter) and Reddit are vital to global communication. However, advancements in Large Language Model (LLM) technology give rise to social media bots with unprecedented intelligence. These bots adeptly simulate…
Twitter is now an established and a widely popular news medium. Be it normal banter or a discussion on high impact events like Boston marathon blasts, February 2014 US Icestorm, etc., people use Twitter to get updates. Twitter bots have…
Including diverse voices in political decision-making strengthens our democratic institutions. Within the Canadian political system, there is gender inequality across all levels of elected government. Online abuse, such as hateful tweets,…
While much work on web agents emphasizes the promise of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of users, in reality, agents often fall short on complex tasks in real-world contexts and modeling user preference. This presents an opportunity…
There is substantial concern about the ability of advanced artificial intelligence to influence people's behaviour. A rapidly growing body of research has found that AI can produce large persuasive effects on people's attitudes, but whether…
Intelligent agents have great potential as facilitators of group conversation among older adults. However, little is known about how to design agents for this purpose and user group, especially in terms of agent embodiment. To this end, we…
Twitter bots are a controversial element of the platform, and their negative impact is well known. In the field of scientific communication, they have been perceived in a more positive light, and the accounts that serve as feeds alerting…
Technologies are increasingly enrolled in projects to involve civilians in the work of policy-making, often under the label of 'civic technology'. But conventional forms of participation through transactions such as voting provide limited…
Software bots have attracted increasing interest and popularity in both research and society. Their contributions span automation, digital twins, game characters with conscious-like behavior, and social media. However, there is still a lack…
We study how bots contribute to open-source discussions in the Ethereum ecosystem and whether they influence developers' emotional tone. Our dataset covers 36,875 accounts across ten repositories with 105 validated bots (0.28%). Human…
140 characters seems like too small a space for any meaningful information to be exchanged, but Twitter users have found creative ways to get the most out of each Tweet by using different communication tools. This paper looks into how 73…
Socialbots are software-driven user accounts on social platforms, acting autonomously (mimicking human behavior), with the aims to influence the opinions of other users or spread targeted misinformation for particular goals. As socialbots…
Citizen science projects engage people in activities that are part of a scientific research effort. On multi-project citizen science platforms, scientists can create projects consisting of tasks. Volunteers, in turn, participate in…
We study the problem of providing recommended responses to customer service agents in live-chat dialogue systems. Smart-reply systems have been widely applied in real-world applications (e.g. Gmail, LinkedIn Messaging), where most of them…
Online government petitions represent a new data-rich mode of political participation. This work examines the thus far understudied dynamics of sharing petitions on social media in order to garner signatures and, ultimately, a government…
Perspective taking, which allows people to imagine another's thinking and goals, is known to be an effective method for promoting prosocial behaviors in human-computer interactions. However, most of the previous studies have focused on…